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Automatic for the People

The title of this blog post is the title of, in my rapid eye movements, one the best albums ever: Automatic for the People by R.E.M., which came out 25 years ago in 1992.

It began in manufacturing

Automation began in the manufacturing industry. Since then automation has been part of most other industries. Not at least within Information Technology, automation is part of the promise in almost every initiative.

When automating stuff, we should always be aware of not just automating old bad processes. To the most extreme, as Michael Hammer said back in 1990: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.

However, some of the most successful companies today are companies born in the information age and delivering services that in a high degree automates processes of value to their customers based on working intensively with information technology.

How can we close the loop and bring that kind of modern automation back to where it began: In the manufacturing industry? The challenges of doing that was examined by Harri Juntunen in a guest blog post called Data Born Companies and the Rest of Us.

IT will come back to manufacturing

In all humbleness we want to be part of that endeavor at Product Data Lake. Therefore, we are setting up a Product Data Push solution for manufacturers, in order to solve one of most severe issues for manufacturers today, being a dysfunctional flow of product information out to whoever is managing the point of sales for the produced goods.

Automation is the end goal. But in order to get started, we accept upload of product information in whatever format, structure and state it is available in. We will then get it in shape to be pulled by retailers, etailers and other trading partners. We will use manual workforce for that and we will use Artificial Intelligence for that too. And in the end, it will be automatic for the people.